Saturday, June 21, 2014

Poem for Saturday, UMCP Sheep, Change of Heart

Summer SolsticeBy Stacie Cassarino

I wanted to see where beauty comes fromwithout you in the world, hauling my heartacross sixty acres of northeast meadow,my pockets filling with flowers.Then I remembered,it’s you I miss in the brightnessand body of every living name:rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.You are the green wonder of June,root and quasar, the thirst for salt.When I finally understand that people failat love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,the paper wings of the dragonflyaeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?If I get the story right, desire is continuous,equatorial. There is still so muchI want to know: what you believecan never be removed from us,what you dreamed on Walnut Streetin the unanswerable dark of your childhood,learning pleasure on your own.Tell me our story: are we impetuous,are we kind to each other, do we surrenderto what the mind cannot think past?Where is the evidence I will learnto be good at loving?The black dog orbits the horseshoe pondfor treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.There are violet hills,there is the covenant of duskbirds.The moon comes over the mountainlike a big peach, and I want to tell youwhat I couldn’t say the night we rushedNorth, how I love the seriousness of your fingersand the way you go into yourself,calling my half-name like a secret.I stand between taproot and treespire.Here is the compass roseto help me live through this.Here are twelve ways of knowingwhat blooms even in the blindnessof such longing. Yellow oxeye,viper’s bugloss with its set of pink armspleading do not forget me.We hunger for eloquence.We measure the isopleths.I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.Fireflies turn on their electric wills:an effulgence. Let me come backwhole, let me remember how to touch youbefore it is too late.

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Happy Midsummer! I had what is becoming a pretty standard summer Friday. Paul worked from home because the van was getting its A/C fixed and because we were going to retrieve Daniel in the afternoon, I spent the morning working on a review of Deep Space Nine's "Change of Heart", my favorite Worf episode in 10+ years of him on Star Trek, then we had lunch together. I had to go pick up Adam from the slumber party he attended after the Super Smash Bros. tournament the night before, but he was quickly out again to go swimming, then home long enough to shower and go to another party.

The rest of us got home from College Park after swinging by the farm to see the sheep (we also saw several geese and deer near the woods), picked up the van, then went to my parents' for dinner. I listened to more World Cup than I actually saw, but it was not a great sports day for anyone I was rooting for anyway -- the Orioles lost to the Yankees and the Nationals lost to Atlanta, so it is just as well that we weren't watching either of those games! Instead we were watching more Orphan Black, which has so many fantastic women! Here are some of the sheep trying to keep cool at the University of Maryland campus farm: